Reflections on Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company by Gary Jansen
Sylvia is my muse, my light, my inspiration. A devote reader, a superb writer, an artist, a lover of books, Sylvia has changed my life!
Once upon a time Sylvia Beach, a native of New Jersey, traveled to Paris and opened a tiny American bookstore on the Left Bank. The year was 1919 and her shop was called Shakespeare and Company. In the decades that followed, it became a magnet that attracted new and established writers who flocked to the French capital in the tumultuous years following The Great War. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and D. H. Lawrence perused her stacks and debated and discussed the one thing that inflamed all their passions: the words found in books. Sylvia is also famously known for being the first person to publish a naughty little book by a fellow named James Joyce: Ulysses. When no one else would take a chance or put up the money, she was there for him and for all these struggling writers and artists who were wandering around post-war Europe like refugees. Her patrons may have been the voices of the Lost Generation, but Sylvia gave them a place to temporarily find themselves and each other.
This intimate memoir, originally published in 1956, is a revealing look at those years, maybe the most artistically exciting of the 20th century. A time in-between wars, when a stunned group of visionaries, and a tenacious and passionate young woman named Sylvia, came together to change the way we read today…and will forever.
